Not being designed by God or evolution for flying, man flies highest; not being designed for digging, man digs deepest; not being designed with thick fur, man is warmest; not being designed with fangs or claws or camouflage, man is the deadliest and best defended.

This is because man has not been designed, you see, it is that he is the designer. And this is the Divine Image in him.

*

It is an impossible task to rationalize the claim that man is designed by God or Nature to observe or conceptualize himself as specifically and absolutely DISTINCT from these things. Because by “design”, the root assertion is that man is NOT in fact, himself at all, but is a DIRECT function of the powers which have designed him. In other words, “designed by” really means “entirely created by”, which really means “absolutely a function of”, which means that all that man, and his reality, is and does is utterly DETERMINED by the Creative Force.

And just like that science and religion utterly unite in metaphysics.

How can God or Nature determine that man should observe God or Nature, and all of that which is a function of Him/It—that is, Reality, Itself—from OUTSIDE of Him/It? For he who is absolutely determined by divine or evolutionary Force can by no rational means observe and conceptualize a distinction between himself and that which determines him.

Determinism, you see, is not a physical phenomenon or an adjunct religious doctrine, but a METAPHYSICAL premise. It asserts that whatever IS, does not, in itself, exist, but is merely an expression of the Determining Force, either God or Nature. It is scientifically “proven” by appealing to empirical “cause and effect”, but the the presupposition which makes determinism in fact deterministic, and thus “cause and effect” a thing which is said to be efficacious and practical in reality, is that there is no ACTUAL distinction between the two. The cause utterly creates the effect; which means, at root, that the cause IS the effect. For if the two are separated, intrinsically, then they cannot exist.

Determinism as a metaphysic, whether ceded to be a function of God or Nature, despite what you might hear, allows for NO distinction of any kind between the Determining Force and the determined thing. To make a distinction is to concede that the thing which is being determined possesses a root essence, or really, an existence, which is of ITSELF, and not of that which determines it. In this case, the thing which exists of itself is caused upon by the Determining Force fundametally because IT is ABLE, intrinsically of ITSELF, to be caused upon. Without the inherent, endemic ability of the “determined” object to be acted upon by the “Determining Force”, there is no determining action, and thus there is NO Determining Force. Meaning that the Determining Force is entirely subordinated to the inherent and endemic ability of the object to be acted upon.

So here is the root, self-nullifying contradiction of Determinism, whether divine or evolutionary:

Without a distinction between the Determining Force and that which is determined, there can be no determinism because there is NOTHING (no thing OF ITSELF which is being caused upon) to determine, and thus by definition no Determining Force. Yet if there IS a distinction then there can likewise be no determinism, and thus no Determining Force, because what actually—that is, fundamentally—causes the object to “react” to the force which compels it is not the Determining Force but rather the root ABILITY of the object to be caused upon by the Force in the first place. It is this ability, and not the Determining Force, which is the source of ALL of its behavior, including EXISTING, which makes its very existence a thing of itself, and to itself, and nothing else, at root. Which means that the Determing Force is not actually determining anything at all, which means it, unlike the thing it is said to determine, does not actually exist.

Due to its inexorable, intrinsic, self-nullifying rational contradiction, the Determining Force, be it God (as religion currently and for the most part defines Him…which is wholly irrational and therefore a lie) OR Nature, is relegated to the category of pure abstraction; utterly useless with respect to any philosophy of virtue and integrity and intellectual honesty/consistency. As a determining force, God or Nature is not REAL in the ontological, empirical, physical sense, and therefore is irrelevant in the metaphysical sense (the metaphysical being the substrata of the physical). All that is said to be determined actually determines itself, we might say (and human consciousness (will and choice) is THE practical manifestation of this, I submit).

And thus is the irreconcilable schism, at the most fundamental level, within the ideal of a divine or evolutionary creative force. Because of the contradiction inherent in the proposition (that that which exists is intrinsically a function of an all-determining Force), the proposition, though it may have some practical utility (e.g. science as a means of technological progress), this utility is limited, and substantially so, I aver. Man may progress only so far as his metaphysical premises will take him, and the overwhelming and prevailing determinist metaphysics underwriting virtually all of science and religion/spirituality can and will NEVER rationally nor efficaciously describe reality qua reality. And if man doesn’t truly understand reality he doesn’t truly understand himself. Which ultimately makes ALL of his ideas fundametally destructive, because they necessarily affirm the notion of the insufficiency, irrelevance, and incongruency of man as a CONSCIOUS being. And this means that the only rational purpose of man qua man (man AS HIMSELF) is to die.